Barack Obama Bent Over Backwards to Advance Islamic Totalitarianism in Iran

This is a must-read.

From Sohrab Ahmari, at Commentary, "Anything for the Ayatollah":

My column on Obama bending over backward to help the mullahs cash in on the Iran deal made @RealClearNews this morning. Read it here. https://t.co/aHdMaE1c6n

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) June 7, 2018

The full history of the Obama administration’s nuclear dealings with Iran has yet to be written, not least because many of the details remain shrouded in secrecy. The bits of the story that do seep out into the public sphere invariably reinforce a single theme: that of Barack Obama’s utter abjection and pusillanimity before Tehran, and his corresponding contempt for the American people and their elected representatives.

Wednesday’s bombshell Associated Press scoop detailing the Obama administration’s secret effort to help Tehran gain access to the American financial system was a case study. In the months after Iran and the great powers led by the U.S. agreed on the nuclear deal, the Obama Treasury Department issued a special license that would have permitted the Tehran regime to convert some $6 billion in assets held in Omani rials into U.S. dollars before eventually trading them for euros. That middle step—the conversion from Omani to American currency—would have violated sanctions that remained in place even after the nuclear accord.

That’s according to the AP’s Josh Lederman and Matthew Lee, citing a newly released report from the GOP-led Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Lederman and Lee write: “The effort was unsuccessful because American banks—themselves afraid of running afoul of U.S. sanctions—declined to participate. The Obama administration approached two U.S. banks to facilitate the conversion . . . but both refused, citing the reputational risk of doing business with or for Iran.”

Put another way: The Obama administration pressed American banks to sidestep rules barring Iran from the U.S. financial system, and the only reason the transaction didn’t take place was because the banks had better legal and moral sense than the Obama Treasury.

This was far from the first instance in which the Obama administration bent over backward, going far beyond the requirements of the deal, to help the Iranian regime cash in on the deal...

Still more.

Democrats' Counterintelligence Operation Against Donald Trump's Presidential Campaign

It's Sharyl Attkisson, at the Hill, "8 signs pointing to a counterintelligence operation deployed against Trump's campaign":

My latest in The Hill: 8 signs pointing to a counterintelligence operation deployed against Trump's campaign https://t.co/CHyDoeHDpb

— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) May 23, 2018

It may be true that President Trump illegally conspired with Russia and was so good at covering it up he’s managed to outwit our best intel and media minds who've searched for irrefutable evidence for two years. (We still await special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings.)

But there’s a growing appearance of alleged wrongdoing equally as insidious, if not more so, because it implies widespread misuse of America’s intelligence and law enforcement apparatus.

Here are eight signs pointing to a counterintelligence operation deployed against Trump for political reasons...

Keep reading.

Obama Trump Swing Voters

At the New York Times, "They Voted for Obama, Then Went for Trump. Can Democrats Win Them Back?":

I interviewed 38 Obama-Trump voters. Takeaway: Most Americans are not thinking very much about politics. They have busy lives. They don't have time for Twitter. https://t.co/KAFHZqVKTB

— Sabrina Tavernise (@stavernise) May 4, 2018

RITTMAN, Ohio — In the daily race that is her life, Sharla Baker does not think about politics very much.

She rises early, drives to the gas station to buy coffee, feeds her baby, dresses her two other children, ages 3 and 2, and hustles them all off to day care. By 9:30 a.m. she pulls into a hair salon 45 minutes away, where she is training to be a cosmetologist. She waxes and cuts all day long, making only the money she earns in tips, which on a recent day last month was $8.41.

But Ms. Baker does vote. She picked Barack Obama for president in 2008 and 2012. He seemed sincere and looked like a happy family man. But most important, he was a Democrat. Her great-grandmother, who grew up poor in Pennsylvania, always said that Democrats look out for the poor people.

In 2016, though, she voted for Donald J. Trump. Yes, he was rich and seemed mean on his TV show, “The Apprentice.” But she liked how he talked about jobs and wages and people being left out of the economy.

Now, more than a year later, she is wavering.

“I voted for Trump because I wanted some change going on,” said Ms. Baker, 28. “But then again, maybe he’s going to do the wrong change.”

The swing of Obama voters to Mr. Trump proved a decisive factor in the 2016 presidential election. Of the more than 650 counties that chose Mr. Obama twice, about a third flipped to Mr. Trump. Many were in states critical to Mr. Trump’s win, like Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.

John Sides, a political-science professor at George Washington University, has estimated that 9 percent of voters who cast ballots for Mr. Obama ended up voting for Mr. Trump. Among white voters who had never been to college, it was 22 percent.

Now, as the country lurches into another election season — this time the prize is control of Congress — a crucial question for Democrats is whether the party will be able to lure these voters back. Democrats have had some early successes. Wins in Alabama, Pennsylvania and Virginia have given Democrats hope that voters might be souring on Mr. Trump — to the point that the party might flip control of the House and possibly even the Senate. Next week’s primary races in Ohio and West Virginia, both states that went for Mr. Trump in 2016, will also serve as tests of voter enthusiasm for Democrats.

We recently asked people who cast ballots for both Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump to describe how they felt about the president and the Democratic Party ahead of the midterms. In interviews with 38 voters in 14 states across four months, a clear pattern emerged. Voters said they did not like Mr. Trump as a person and did not consider themselves die-hard supporters. Some were even embarrassed by him.

But many were basically satisfied with his policies. The tax bill was mildly positive, they said. Several had a bit of extra money in their paycheck. They liked that he was trying to address illegal immigration. Only a few regretted their vote...

More.

More Than 16 Years After 9/11, Some Americans Say It’s Time to Reevaluate Our Foreign Military Deployments

From Rukmini Callimachi, et al., at the New York Times, "‘An Endless War’: Why 4 U.S. Soldiers Died in a Remote African Desert":

What started as a training mission of 40, grew to a presence of 800 and ended up killing 4 soldiers in an outrageous chain of tactical & strategic blunders. Incompetence at its worse. https://t.co/LdinVOhfxu

— Weddady (@weddady) February 18, 2018

An important - and exclusive - read: Dogged reporting and empathetic writing on the U.S. government’s mistakes that lead to an Oct. 4 ambush in Niger that killed 4 American soldiers. @rcallimachi @helenecooper @EricSchmittNYT @alanblinder @Tmgneff @NYTimes https://t.co/EeFDV8Biyc

— Lara Jakes (@jakesNYT) February 18, 2018

KOLLO, Niger — Cut off from their unit, the tiny band of American soldiers was outnumbered and outgunned in the deserts of Niger, fighting to stay alive under a barrage of gunfire from fighters loyal to the Islamic State.

Jogging quickly at a crouch, Staff Sgt. Bryan C. Black motioned to the black S.U.V. beside him to keep moving. At the wheel, Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright tried to steer while leaning away from the gunfire. But the militants, wielding assault rifles and wearing dark scarves and balaclavas, kept closing in.

Sergeant Black suddenly went down. With one hand, Sergeant Wright dragged his wounded comrade to the precarious shielding of the S.U.V. and took up a defensive position, his M4 carbine braced on his shoulder.

“Black!” yelled a third American soldier, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah W. Johnson, checking for the wounds. Sergeant Black lay on his back, motionless and unresponsive.

Cornered, Sergeant Wright and Sergeant Johnson finally took off, sprinting through the desert under a hail of fire. Sergeant Johnson was hit and went down, still alive.

At that point, Sergeant Wright stopped running. With only the thorny brush for cover, he turned and fired at the militants advancing toward his fallen friend.

These were the last minutes in the lives of three American soldiers killed on Oct. 4 during an ambush in the desert scrub of Niger that was recorded on a military helmet camera. A fourth American, Sgt. La David Johnson, who had gotten separated from the group, also died in the attack — the largest loss of American troops during combat in Africa since the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” debacle in Somalia.

The four men, along with four Nigerien soldiers and an interpreter, were killed in a conflict that few Americans knew anything about, not just the public, but also their families and even some senior American lawmakers.

The deaths set off a political storm in Washington, erupting into a bitter debate over how the families of fallen soldiers should be treated by their commander in chief. In a call with one of the families after the ambush, President Trump was accused of diminishing the loss, telling the soldier’s widow that “he knew what he signed up for.” Mr. Trump angrily disputed the claim, leading to a public feud.

But beyond the rancor, dozens of interviews with current and former officials, soldiers who survived the ambush and villagers who witnessed it point to a series of intelligence failures and strategic miscalculations that left the American soldiers far from base, in hostile territory longer than planned, with no backup or air support, on a mission they had not expected to perform.

They had set out on Oct. 3, prepared for a routine, low-risk patrol with little chance of encountering the enemy. But while they were out in the desert, American intelligence officials caught a break — the possible location of a local terrorist leader who, by some accounts, is linked to the kidnapping of an American citizen. A separate assault team was quickly assembled, ready to swoop in on the terrorist camp by helicopter. But the raid was scrapped at the last minute, and the Americans on patrol were sent in its place.

They didn’t find any militants. Instead, the militants found them. Short on water, the patrol stopped outside a village before heading back to base the next morning. Barely 200 yards from the village, the convoy came under deadly fire.

Four months later, tough questions remain unanswered about the chain of decisions that led to American Special Forces troops being overwhelmed by jihadists in a remote stretch of West Africa.

How did a group of American soldiers — who Defense Department officials insisted were in the country simply to train, advise and assist Niger’s military — suddenly get sent to search a terrorist camp, a much riskier mission than they had planned to carry out? Who ordered the mission, and why were the Americans so lightly equipped, with few heavy weapons and no bulletproof vehicles?

More broadly, the deaths have reignited a longstanding argument in Washington over the sprawling and often opaque war being fought by American troops around the world. It is a war with sometimes murky legal authority, one that began in the embers of the Sept. 11 attacks and traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was expanded to Yemen, Somalia and Libya before arriving in Niger, a place few Americans ever think of, let alone view as a threat.

The ashes of the fallen twin towers were still smoldering on Sept. 14, 2001, when Congress voted overwhelmingly, with virtually no debate, to authorize the American military to hunt down the perpetrators. It was a relatively narrow mandate, written for those specific attacks, but it has become the underpinning of an increasingly broad mission around the globe. For more than 16 years since that vote, American service members have been deployed in a war that has gradually stretched to jihadist groups that did not exist in 2001 and now operate across distant parts of the world.

The result has been an amorphous and contested war that has put Navy SEALs in Somalia and Yemen, Delta Force soldiers in Iraq, and Green Berets in Niger in harm’s way...

More.

The Hateful Ideology and Rhetoric of Homosexual Rights

I get some mean and nasty homosexuals at my college. And to think, it's been 10 years since Proposition 8. Maybe a deep backlash is setting in, and none too soon.

Read Andrew "Milky Loads" Sullivan, at New York Magazine:

Andrew Sullivan: Since achieving marriage rights, there’s been a radicalization of the gay rights movement’s ideology and rhetoric https://t.co/naGSy5UjH4

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) January 28, 2018

"The sewer of most of Twitter is now so rank that even addicts have begun to realize that they are sinking in oceans of shitholery."

https://t.co/emm9BvPYSw via @intelligencer

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 26, 2018

"Social media has turned journalism into junk, has promoted addictive addlement in our brains, is wrecking our democracy, and slowly replacing life with pseudo-life."

https://t.co/emm9BvPYSw via @intelligencer

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 26, 2018

Iran's Revolution of National Dignity

From Sohrab Ahmari and Peter Kohanloo, at Commentary, "An Iranian Revolution of National Dignity":

“After nearly four decades of plunderous and fanatical Islamist rule, Iranians are desperate to become a normal nation-state once more, and they refuse to be exploited for an ideological cause that long ago lost its luster.” https://t.co/zTJ2UZe8Ju pic.twitter.com/mSfhaEM1Bp

— Peter Kohanloo (@PeterKohanloo) January 1, 2018

Iran is convulsing with the largest mass uprising since the 2009 Green Movement. Demonstrations that began last week in the city of Mashhad, home to the shrine of the eighth Shiite imam, have now spread to dozens of cities. And while the slogans initially addressed inflation, joblessness, and graft, they soon morphed into outright opposition to the mullahs. As we write, the authorities have blocked access to popular social-media sites and closed off subway stations in the capital, Tehran, to prevent crowd sizes from growing. At least 12 people have been killed in clashes with security forces.

What is happening in the Islamic Republic?

After nearly four decades of plunderous and fanatical Islamist rule, Iranians are desperate to become a normal nation-state once more, and they refuse to be exploited for an ideological cause that long ago lost its luster. It is a watershed moment in Iran’s history: The illusion of reform within the current theocratic system has finally been shattered. Iranians, you might say, are determined to make Iran great again.

Their movement is attuned to the worldwide spirit of nationalist renewal. From the U.S. to India, and from South Africa to Britain, political leaders and the voters who elect them are reaffirming the enduring value of the nation-state. Iran hasn’t been immured from these developments, as the slogans of the current protests indicate. No longer using the rights-based lexicon of votes and recounts, Iranians are instead demanding national dignity from a regime that for too long has subjugated Iranian-ness to its Shiite, revolutionary mission.

It’s notable, for example, that protestors chant “We Will Die to Get Iran Back,” “Not Gaza, Not Lebanon, My Life Only for Iran,” and “Let Syria Be, Do Something for Me.” Put another way: The people are tired of paying the price for the regime’s efforts to remake the region in its own image and challenge U.S. “hegemony.” Some have even taken to chanting “Reza Shah, Bless Your Soul,” expressing gratitude and nostalgia for the Pahlavi era, which saw the modern, pro-Western nation-state of Iran emerge from the shambles of the Persian Empire.

Iran’s Islamist rulers have never had a comfortable relationship with Iranian nationalism. In the early post-revolutionary days, Ayatollah Khomeini’s followers set out to rip the pre-Islamic threads that formed the tapestry of national identity: pride in the Persian New Year, the architectural glories of Persepolis, and the epic poetry that has long shaped the national soul–all these things were deemphasized if not altogether forbidden.

More recently, however, the regime has sought to harness its ideological and regional ambitions to national pride and memory. Qassem Soleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander spearheading the war effort in Syria and Iraq, was increasingly presented as a latter-day Cyrus the Great. The regime claimed that it had to fight the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq lest Iran be forced to defend itself at home, and the idea even gained currency among many secular, middle-class Iranians. Meanwhile, some regime figures, such as former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, tried to present an idea of “Iranian Islam” that was both pure and consistent with a nationalistic vision.

But as the uprising underway now suggests, that project has utterly failed. No amount of propaganda and revisionism could mask the regime’s constitutional hostility to talk of nationalism and nationhood. Nor could it mollify Iranians who saw their national wealth squandered on adventures in Arab lands that didn’t concern them; “Gaza” was an abstraction to the vast majority. Nor, finally, could this regime-led nationalist push uplift Iranians, whose daily lives were marked by poverty, repression, and isolation from the rest of the world.

The current uprising, then, poses a far more potent threat to mullah power than its previous iterations, because nationalism is a far more potent force than liberal-democratic aspiration. If enough Iranians come to view their regime as an obstacle to national greatness, the Islamic Republic’s days will be over–an outcome that is squarely in the U.S. national-security interest.

The new Iran that could emerge from such an uprising may not be a liberal state, as the West understands the concept. But its calculations about the country’s place in the region and the world are far more likely to be driven by normal, nation-state priorities. The people who are making the revolution, after all, are tired of serving someone else’s messianic cause...

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Josh Meyer Gets an Echo Chamber Beat-Down

This is really good:

Twitter mob attacks by a name-calling scrum of mid-level bureaucrats, “security correspondents” for instant news outfits like Buzzfeed, interns at various NGOs and their self-credentialed “expert” bosses, partisan bot herders, and their Lord of the Flies puppet-masters are part of the price of doing journalism these days. Write something negative, and you’ll get dirtied up—and maybe some of the dirt will stick, who knows. These attacks are intended to be punitive. Brave or foolhardy reporters who deviate from the party line—the party in question being the Democrats, of course, since the representation of conservatives in newsrooms is generally reported to be somewhere in the single digits—and especially their colleagues watching from the sidelines, are meant to absorb a simple but all-important lesson: Get on the team, or else shut up. Watching even seasoned pros succumb to this kind of adolescent pressure game and publicly suck up to bullying flacks while throwing shade on members of their own profession is a depressingly normal occurrence, which shows that the two once-separate professions—partisan flackery, and reporting the news—have merged into a single, mindless borg.

Obama derailed secret fight against Hezbollah for Iran Deal... https://t.co/XZglS6kSNx

— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) December 18, 2017

That's the thing @Tvietor08 your echo chamber keeps saying my @politico piece is wrong but offer zero specifics. I'm gonna take the high road and not respond further until you do. Meantime, happy holidays y'all. Btw, don't you supporters of Iran Deal also have "an obvious POV"? https://t.co/suI1dxnr2G

— Josh Meyer (@JoshMeyerDC) December 21, 2017

Why journalists joined a Twittermob of former mid-level Obama bureaucrats and intel officers to attack a journalist for doing journalism @tabletmag https://t.co/sYKeovN7fF

— Lee Smith (@LeeSmithDC) December 27, 2017

Increase in Border Attacks, Smuggling, and Deaths at Texas’ Big Bend Region

Build the freakin' wall already, sheesh.

 At LAT, "Could the Big Bend in Texas be the border's weakest link? Smuggling of drugs and migrants is on the rise":

Two Border Patrol agents bent to study the sandy dirt like animal trackers — what they call "cutting for sign."

They didn't have to look far.

Just yards from the Rio Grande, Agent Lee Smith pointed to footprints and scraps of carpet. Smugglers tie carpet to their shoes in hopes of covering their tracks, he said. Smith followed the rough trail through thick brush, his fellow agent close behind, wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a long gun.

They saw no one. But the agents sensed smugglers watching, waiting.

"They come right across. What's here to stop them?" Smith said.

Sometimes smuggler scouts cross on horseback: The muddy banks are pocked with human and horse tracks. The river here, about 60 miles east of El Paso, is just a few yards wide, one of the reasons Border Patrol agents in Texas' Big Bend region have seen troubling increases in smuggling, attacks on agents and migrant deaths in recent years.

"There's hundreds of these crossings just in our area of operation," Smith said. "The drug cartels, they own this part of the land. We have conceded large swaths of the border. There are areas where there are not agents for days."

He called the vast Big Bend "the absolute weakest link on the southern border."

The natural barriers beyond the river that made the landscape a stunning backdrop for "No Country for Old Men," "There Will Be Blood" and "Giant" were also supposed to protect it. Or at least that was long the assumption of U.S.officials. There's the river. There are mountains — the snow-covered Chinati, Chisos and Davis ranges.

There's the Chihuahuan high desert, the land full of prickly cat claw and temperatures that soar above 100 degrees on summer days and dip to below freezing on winter nights. And for many years, smugglers avoided Big Bend, that part of Texas where the border makes a gentle swoop south before swinging back north.

But smuggling routes shift according to the dictates of criminal organizations, often in response to border enforcement. In the late 1990s, border traffic moved from Southern California to remote desert stretches of Arizona; by 2013, it moved east again to Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the epicenter of migration and enforcement ever since.

But now new routes are opening up to the west, in Big Bend.

"As things in the Rio Grande Valley get tougher to cross, they're looking for other places, and this is a spot that over the past few years has become established for smuggling," said Border Patrol Agent Rush Carter, a spokesman for the agency in Big Bend.

Just as migrants once tried to cross the Arizona desert unprepared, Central Americans are arriving in Big Bend without cold weather gear, abandoned to the elements by smugglers. Migrants tell agents that smugglers advertise the area as an easy crossing, the least patrolled stretch of border.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection divides the southern border into nine sectors. Big Bend is the largest: 135,000 square miles, 510 miles of river, a quarter of the entire southern border.

The sector stretches north to include 118 counties in Texas and all of Oklahoma. Yet it has the smallest staff of any southern border sector, about 500 agents assigned to a dozen stations and several highway checkpoints including one in Sierra Blanca, notorious for large drug busts. That's fewer agents than have been assigned to a single station in the Tucson sector, Smith said.

President Trump has promised to add 5,000 Border Patrol agents, potentially doubling Big Bend staffing, but with high turnover, agents said that they would still be spread thin.

With such a small staff, agents usually patrol alone, with hand-me-down technology from other areas, including radios so spotty agents have erected makeshift cell towers in the brush to boost reception. Sometimes they just yell.

They don't have observation towers along the border as in the Rio Grande Valley, and their single aerostat blimp hovering overhead, unlike those used in the Valley, is not equipped with infrared technology, Smith said...

More.

In Afghanistan, American Airstrikes Escalate — Again

Well, I'm not too upset about it, actually. If the security situation requires more airstrikes, the strike away. I'll be upset if Trump starts getting a the kind of flak over this from the media that Obama never got.

At LAT, "U.S. airstrikes rise sharply in Afghanistan — and so do civilian deaths":

U.S. airstrikes rise sharply in Afghanistan — and so do civilian deaths https://t.co/NXnAQsCfLP pic.twitter.com/Qpg2OgzVcv

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) December 4, 2017

As U.S. warplanes flew above a cluster of villages where Islamic State militants were holed up in eastern Afghanistan, 11 people piled into a truck and drove off along an empty dirt track to escape what they feared was imminent bombing.

They did not get far.

An explosion blasted the white Suzuki truck off the road, opening a large crater in the earth and flipping the vehicle on its side in a ditch. A teenage girl survived. The 10 dead included three children, one an infant in his mother’s arms.

The lone survivor of the Aug. 10 blast in Nangarhar province, and Afghan officials who visited the site, said the truck was hit by an American airstrike shortly before 5 p.m. Relatives expressed horror that U.S. ground forces and surveillance aircraft could have mistaken the passengers, who included women and children riding in the open truck bed — in daylight with no buildings or other vehicles around — for Islamic State fighters.

“How could they not see there were women and children in the truck?” said Zafar Khan, 23, who lost six family members, including his mother and three siblings, in the blast.

In a statement after the incident, the U.S. military acknowledged carrying out a strike but said it killed militants who “were observed loading weapons into a vehicle” and “there was zero chance of civilian casualties.”

Pockets of Nangarhar remain inaccessible to outsiders because of fighting, making it impossible to independently determine the cause of the fatal explosion. What is not in question is that in the 17th year of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, American airstrikes are escalating again, along with civilian casualties.

Operating under looser restrictions on air power that commanders hope will break a stalemate in the war, U.S. fighter planes this year dropped 3,554 explosives in Afghanistan through Oct. 31, the most since 2012.

American officials say the firepower has curtailed the growth of Islamic State’s South Asia affiliate — known as ISIS-Khorasan, which they believe numbers about 900 fighters, most of them in Nangarhar — and enabled struggling government forces to regain ground against Taliban insurgents in other provinces, such as Helmand, where a Marine-led task force has helped coordinate a months-long offensive.

But innocent Afghans are asking: At what cost?

The United Nations mission in Afghanistan documented 205 civilian deaths and 261 injuries from airstrikes in the first nine months this year, a 52% increase in casualties compared with the same period in 2016. Although both U.S. and Afghan forces conduct aerial attacks, preliminary data indicate that American strikes have been more lethal for civilians.

In the first six months of 2017, the U.N. said, 54 civilians died in international air operations, compared with 29 in Afghan strikes. Twelve additional deaths could not be attributed to either force, the U.N. found.

In the case of the blast in Nangarhar province in August, U.S. officials have continued to assert that the American airstrike that day struck only militants. But they have since offered an alternative explanation for the civilian deaths. Responding to questions from The Times, coalition officials said that a passenger vehicle — presumably the Suzuki truck — hit a roadside bomb planted by Islamic State militants slightly more than a mile from where the airstrike killed the militants. It was the roadside bomb that resulted “in multiple enemy-caused civilian casualties,” said Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, a spokesman for coalition forces in Kabul.

Afghans vigorously dispute that account. The district police chief, Hamidullah Sadaqat, said there was only one deadly explosion in the area that afternoon. Rozina, the 17-year-old survivor, said her memory was clear...

Paintsville, Kentucky: When Government Tried to Fix a Coal Town (VIDEO)

Here's the lovely Kelsey Harkness, at the Daily Signal, "Underreported: What Happened When Government Tried to Fix a Coal Town."

Jeff Sessions Returns Department of Justice to Rule of Law

From Andrew McCarthy, at NRO, "On Criminal Justice, Sessions iss Returning DOJ to the Rule of Law":

A response to Joyce Vance and Carter Stewart

wo former top Obama-appointed prosecutors co-author a diatribe against Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions for returning the Justice Department to purportedly outdated, too “tough on crime” charging practices. Yawn. After eight years of Justice Department stewardship by Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and after Obama’s record 1,715 commutations that systematically undermined federal sentencing laws, we know the skewed storyline.

The surprise is to find such an argument in the pages of National Review Online. But there it was on Tuesday: “On Criminal Justice, Sessions Is Returning DOJ to the Failed Policies of the Past,” by Joyce Vance and Carter Stewart, formerly the United States attorneys for, respectively, the Northern District of Alabama and the Southern District of Ohio. Ms. Vance is now lecturing on criminal-justice reform at the University of Alabama School of Law and doing legal commentary at MSNBC. Mr. Stewart has moved on to the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, fresh from what it describes as his “leadership role at DOJ in addressing inequities in the criminal justice system,” focusing on “alternatives to incarceration,” and “reducing racial disparities in the federal system.”

The authors lament that Sessions has reinstituted guidelines requiring prosecutors “to charge the most serious offenses and ask for the lengthiest prison sentences.” This, the authors insist, is a “one-size-fits-all policy” that “doesn’t work.” It marks a return to the supposedly “ineffective and damaging criminal-justice policies that were imposed in 2003,” upsetting the “bipartisan consensus” for “criminal-justice reform” that has supposedly seized “today’s America.”

This is so wrongheaded, it’s tough to decide where to begin.

In reality, what Sessions has done is return the Justice Department to the traditional guidance articulated nearly four decades ago by President Carter’s highly regarded attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti (and memorialized in the U.S. Attorney’s Manual). It instructs prosecutors to charge the most serious, readily provable offense under the circumstances. Doesn’t work? This directive, in effect with little variation until the Obama years, is one of several factors that contributed to historic decreases in crime. When bad guys are prosecuted and incarcerated, they are not preying on our communities. The thrust of the policy Sessions has revived is respect for the Constitution’s bedrock separation-of-powers principle. It requires faithful execution of laws enacted by Congress.

The thrust of the policy Sessions has revived is respect for the Constitution’s bedrock separation-of-powers principle. It requires faithful execution of laws enacted by Congress.

A concrete example makes the point. Congress has prescribed a minimum ten-year sentence for the offense of distributing at least five kilograms of cocaine (see section 841(b)(1)(A)(ii) of the federal narcotics laws). Let’s say a prosecutor is presented with solid evidence that a defendant sold seven kilograms of cocaine. The crime is readily provable. Nevertheless, the prosecutor follows the Obama deviation from traditional Justice Department policy, charging a much less serious offense: a distribution that does not specify an amount of cocaine — as if we were talking about a one-vial street sale. The purpose of this sleight of hand is to evade the controlling statute’s ten-year sentence, inviting the judge to impose little or no jail time.

That is not prosecutorial discretion. It is the prosecutor substituting his own judgment for Congress’s regarding the gravity of the offense. In effect, the prosecutor is decreeing law, not enforcing what is on the books — notwithstanding the wont of prosecutors to admonish that courts must honor Congress’s laws as written. Absent this Justice Department directive that prosecutors must charge the most serious, readily provable offense, the executive branch becomes a law unto itself. Bending congressional statutes to the executive’s policy preferences was the Obama approach to governance, so we should not be surprised that a pair of his appointed prosecutors see it as a model for criminal enforcement, too. But it is not enforcement of the law. It is executive imperialism. It is DACA all over again: “Congress refuses to codify my policy preferences; but I have raw executive power so I shall impose them by will . . . and call it ‘prosecutorial discretion.’” (In truth, it is a distortion of prosecutorial discretion.)

It should not be necessary to point out to accomplished lawyers that, in our system, “bipartisan consensus” is not a comparative handful of Democrats and Republicans clucking their tongues in unison. Yes, between leftist hostility to incarceration and libertarian skepticism about prosecutorial power, there is common ground among some factions of lawmakers when it comes to opposing our allegedly draconian penal code. But these factions are not much of a consensus. The only consensus that matters is one that drums up support sufficient to enact legislation into law. “Criminal-justice reform” is of a piece with “comprehensive immigration reform” and the Obama agenda: If it actually enjoyed broad popularity, resort to executive fiat would be unnecessary — Congress would codify it.

The criminal-justice “reformers” want mandatory-minimum-sentencing provisions eliminated and other sentencing provisions mitigated. Yet, despite the sympathetic airing they get from the “progressive” mainstream media, they are unable to get their “reforms” passed by Congress. How come? Because strong majorities of lawmakers understand themselves to be accountable to commonsense citizens — people who aren’t “evolved” enough to grasp how reducing the number of criminals in prisons will somehow decrease the amount of crime. Most of us benighted types proceed under the quaint assumption that, even in “today’s America,” the streets are safer when the criminals are not on them.

In light of the caterwauling about mandatory-minimum sentencing by people either unfamiliar with or in a state of amnesia about what the federal system was like before it was instituted, it is worth repeating: Such provisions mean that the public, rather than the judge, decides the minimum appropriate term for serious crimes. As a class, judges are elite products of American universities and tend to be more left-leaning than the general public. That is particularly the case with respect to President Obama’s 335 judicial appointees, many of them — like Obama himself, as well as Vance and Stewart — philosophically resistant to incarceration as a response to crime. We can certainly repeal mandatory minimums, but if we do, it will vest those judges with unfettered discretion to mete out punishment...

Sessions is Numero Uno in my book. I was bummed upon hearing the talk of his possible resignation. We really need this guy at the helm over there. He's MAGA.

Keep reading.

The Rotting Soulless Moral Abomination That is Ben Rhodes

Ben Rhodes was Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser.

Seth Mandel excoriates him:

HOLY CRAP. Obama officials hijacked the freaking Holocaust Museum and wrote a "study" absolving Obama for Syria https://t.co/qJm8KjKB93

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) September 6, 2017

There are no words to aptly describe the rotting soulless moral abomination that is Ben Rhodes https://t.co/qJm8KjKB93

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) September 6, 2017

Roots of the Current Campus Madness

At great piece, from an unexpected source, Scientific American, "The Unfortunate Fallout of Campus Postmodernism":

Students are being taught by these postmodern professors that there is no truth, that science and empirical facts are tools of oppression by the white patriarchy, and that nearly everyone in America is racist and bigoted, including their own professors, most of whom are liberals or progressives devoted to fighting these social ills. Of the 58 Evergreen faculty members who signed a statement “in solidarity with students” calling for disciplinary action against Weinstein for “endangering” the community by granting interviews in the national media, I tallied only seven from the sciences. Most specialize in English, literature, the arts, humanities, cultural studies, women's studies, media studies, and “quotidian imperialisms, intermetropolitan geography [and] detournement.” A course called “Fantastic Resistances” was described as a “training dojo for aspiring ‘social justice warriors’” that focuses on “power asymmetries.”

If you teach students to be warriors against all power asymmetries, don't be surprised when they turn on their professors and administrators. This is what happens when you separate facts from values, empiricism from morality, science from the humanities.

RTWT.

Punish Americans for Their Heritage, but Reward 'Dreamers': How #DACA Outrage Exposes the Left

At Breitbart, "By now it is crystal clear: the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was simply a way for President Obama to force his successor to make an unpopular decision."

Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan

See Austin Bay, at Instapundit, and a bunch of links, "IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM: My latest NY Observer essay: After North Korea’s latest missile test, Trump puts “all options on the table”."

And on Afghanistan, "MEANWHILE, BACK IN AFGHANISTAN: The place is a mess. But what the Trump team proposes to do makes a lot more sense than the feckless policies of the feckless Obama. (Another recent Observer essay.)"

Why Trump Is Right About Immigration

From Mark Krikorian, at the National Interest:

For the past two years, ever since Donald Trump’s escalator ride, the immigration debate has focused on enforcement and illegality. The wall, criminal aliens, deportation, Obama’s lawless executive amnesty—it’s been all illegal immigration, all the time.

And that’s as it should be, at first, because if the rules aren’t enforced, it doesn’t much matter what the rules are.

But in the long run the more important questions are: What are the rules? How many people should the federal immigration program admit each year? How should they be selected? How can we minimize the harm from the program while maximizing the benefits?

Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue have started to answer these questions. They joined President Trump at the White House this morning to unveil legislation to restructure and modernize the federal immigration program. The Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act (RAISE Act) resumes the effort undertaken by civil rights icon Barbara Jordan’s U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform in the mid-1990s. Two decades ago, the corporate Right allied with the cultural Left to kill Jordan’s recommended immigration changes. But the logic of those changes didn’t go away. And today’s announcement picks up where she left off.

The Cotton-Perdue bill makes a number of significant changes to the current program. First, it focuses family immigration more narrowly. Currently, two-thirds of the million-plus foreign citizens who get green cards (i.e., permanent residence that can lead to citizenship) each year qualify only because they have relatives already here. This nepotistic system does not screen for skills or education. It also drives chain migration, as each cohort of immigrants sponsors the next one.

The RAISE Act would limit family immigration rights to the actual nuclear family: husbands, wives, and little kids of American citizens and legal residents. The current categories for adult siblings, adult sons and daughters, and parents would be retired. U.S. citizens could still bring in their elderly parents in need of caretaking, but only on renewable nonimmigrant visas (no green cards or citizenship) and only after proving that they’ve paid for health insurance up front.

The second major element in this restructuring addresses the employment-based immigration flow. It is now a jumble of categories and subcategories, the main result of which is to provide steady work for immigration lawyers. The Cotton-Perdue bill would rationalize this mess by creating one, streamlined points system, along the lines of similar schemes in Canada and Australia. Points would be awarded to potential candidates based mainly on education, English-language ability and age, and those who meet a certain benchmark would be in the pool for green cards, with the top scorers being selected first.

The bill would also eliminate the egregious Diversity Visa Lottery and cap refugee admissions at fifty thousand per year, rather than allow the president let in as many as he wants, as is the case today.

The level of immigration—now running at over a million a year—would likely drop by 40 percent, and then drop some more over time, as the number of foreign spouses declined. (Most U.S. citizens marrying foreigners are earlier immigrants, so as they age, and fewer new immigrants come in behind them, the demand for spousal immigration is likely to fall.) That would still mean annual permanent immigration of 500,000–600,000 a year, which is more than any other nation.

The bill isn’t perfect. It leaves the level of skills-based immigration, for instance, at the current 140,000 a year—the world doesn’t generate 140,000 Einsteins annually. It preserves a category for the spouses and minor children of green-card holders, which I don’t think is justified. (That relates to spouses acquired after immigration; if you’re married at the time you get your green card, your spouse automatically gets one too.) And I don’t think there’s any justification for resettling even fifty thousand refugees (as opposed to helping a far greater number at the same cost in the countries where they’ve taken refuge).

Neither does this bill address so-called temporary immigration, where businesses import cheap labor—both higher- and lower-skilled—to make an end-run around the American labor market...

More.

Let the Democrats Be the Trans Party: Trump Will Win Again

From George Neumayer, at the American Spectator, "Let the Dems Be the Transgender Party":

The other day, Bill Kristol, sounding like a spokesman for the ACLU, decried the theism of Donald Trump. “In America the president doesn’t tell us who or what or whether to worship,” he harrumphed on Twitter after Trump merely said that Americans worship God above government.

It is humorous to hear Edmund Burke-quoting “conservatives” peddling such pitiful liberal prattle, all while informing us that Trump isn’t a “real conservative.” Are they? As far as I can tell, most of them support the gay agenda, hold wishy-washy views on most contested cultural matters, support open borders, and second the propaganda about Islam as a religion of peace. And now they are even championing the bogus rights of cross-dressers in the military. These hawks are shocked that the commander-in-chief would command his generals to choose military strength over political correctness! How dare he.

Unlike these phonies, Trump doesn’t clear his throat with classical tags. He doesn’t make nerdy, self-conscious references to the “conservative movement.” But who cares as long as he is restoring common sense to the government? Without common sense, without respect for the natural order of things, “conservatism” is useless. It is just destructive liberalism at a slightly slower speed.

The classicists whom the Wills and the Kristols so pretentiously quote would have recognized the perennial conservatism in Trump’s common sense. They wouldn’t have recognized it in the me-too liberalism of the Never Trumpers.

Trump’s uncomplicated defense of common sense is nothing if not conservative. He doesn’t need “commissions” to tell him whether or not enlisting men who pretend to be women and women who pretend to be men hurts military readiness. Anyone with five senses and a functioning intellect can see that it does. It is only under the vast experiment against common sense that is liberalism could such obvious truths fall into disfavor.

Of course, the stupid party is joining the evil party in this experiment against common sense. And so a host of Republicans, along with pundits like Kristol, threw a wet blanket over the ban. According to this confederacy of dunces, Trump is making a grave political mistake. The Dems naturally agree and have announced to the press that they “welcome this culture war.”

Even West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, in a measure of how extreme the party has become, participated in this PC posturing. The Dems are forevermore the party of compulsory transgender bathrooms and taxpayer-financed mutilations...

More.

Transgender Accommodations and Military Realities

Following-up from yesterday, "Read J.R. Salzman's Twitter Stream."

Here's Ryan Anderson, at the Daily Signal, "5 Good Reasons Why Transgender Accommodations Aren’t Compatible With Military Realities":

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced that he was reversing an Obama-era policy that opened the military to people who identify as transgender.

That policy, announced during the last year of President Barack Obama’s second term, was scheduled to go into effect earlier this month, but Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced a six-month delay in its implementation to review whether it was in fact prudent given the nature of the military and its mission.

The mission of our armed forces is winning wars and protecting the nation. So any personnel policy must prioritize military readiness and mission-critical purposes first.

Trump’s announcement that it would not be feasible to open the military to personnel who identify as transgender returns the military to the policy it had always observed, before the Obama administration’s 12th-hour, politically driven imposition of a transgender agenda.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can't be done alone. Find out more >>

As I explain in my forthcoming book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” the best biology, psychology, and philosophy conclude that sex is a biological reality and that gender is the social expression of that reality.

The most helpful therapies for gender dysphoria focus not on achieving the impossible—changing bodies to conform to thoughts and feelings—but on helping people accept and even embrace the truth about their bodies and reality.

Unfortunately, 41 percent of people who identify as transgender will attempt suicide at some point in their lives, compared to 4.6 percent of the general population. And people who have had transition surgery are 19 times more likely than average to die by suicide.

People who identify as transgender suffer a host of mental health and social problems—including anxiety, depression, and substance abuse—at higher rates than the general population. Biology isn’t bigotry, and we need a sober and honest assessment of the human costs of getting human nature wrong.

So there were well-justified concerns that Obama was using the military to advance the latest social justice culture warrior agenda item—seeking to mainstream transgender identities and promote controversial therapies for gender dysphoria.

Obama’s policy change ignored the reality that placing individuals who might be at increased risk for suicide or other psychological injury in the most stressful situation imaginable—the battlefield—is reckless.

But even people who disagree about the underlying transgender issues should acknowledge that there are practical concerns for the military when it comes to people who identify as transgender.

Wednesday’s announcement reflects good reasons why transgender accommodations are incompatible with military realities. Here are just a few of the considerations...

Keep reading.

BONUS: Pre-order Anderson's book at Amazon, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.

Read J.R. Salzman's Twitter Stream

Following-up from earlier, "President Trump Reverses Obama Administration's Transgender Military Policy."

Read this thread from J.R. Salzman, on Twitter, "I served in Iraq in 2006. For the first five months I was on a 12 man firebase out in the middle of nowhere in the desert."

President Trump Reverses Obama Administration's Transgender Military Policy

I was up at 6:00am, unusually for summer time. As always, I checked Twitter on my iPhone. Trump had just tweeted his announcement minutes before, and all hell was breaking loose.

Let's just say Russia's going to be on the back-burner today, heh. I don't watch cable news currently, but if you tune into CNN and MSNBC, you'll see leftists in outrage all day. It's going to be a great day.

At the Washington Examiner, "Trump: The military will no longer allow transgender people to serve 'in any capacity'." And at the Los Angeles Times, "Trump bars transgender people from serving 'in any capacity' in the U.S. military."

Also at the Hill, via Memeorandum, "Trump to ban transgender people from all military service."

Still more at Twitchy, "Uh oh! George Takei issues Resistance warning to Trump after military transgender ban."